


Free To The People.

by Lanna Michaels (lannamichaels)



Category: A Series of Unfortunate Events (TV)
Genre: Gen, Libraries, Missing Scene, Yuletide 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-17
Updated: 2019-11-17
Packaged: 2021-02-07 23:09:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21466066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lannamichaels/pseuds/Lanna%20Michaels
Summary: A quiet moment while on the run.
Comments: 14
Kudos: 21
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Free To The People.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cherryvanilla](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cherryvanilla/gifts).

> Thanks to cirque for the beta!

The phrase 'on the run' suggests movement. Someone who is 'on the run' may be dodging between streetcars or jumping onto a helicopter off of a mountain. They could be climbing a rope ladder up to a fire escape or sneaking down old, abandoned sewer tunnels. The run is not a road or a sidewalk or a moving platform. You cannot see it. You can only see its traces in the wrinkles in your clothes and on your face.

Someone who is 'on the run' is not usually in a library. Running is typically prohibited in most libraries I know.

For Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire, the Inexplicable Library at Sunset Point was a refuge from being on the run. It did not contain any books they were looking for, but it had four floors of books they didn't know they were looking for. For Sunny, a cookbook on ancient Martian cuisine kept her busy for hours. Klaus found himself in a section of mobius books, each never ending, but pulling him into the next, like a hand in the dark tugging him toward some secret revelation, or to a blindfolded masquerade where they serve canapes and flutes of champagne. 

Violet's browsing was more erratic. In her mind, she was still on the run, even as her feet took her steadily and measuredly through sections on Artifacts, Peonies, and Erosion. She was looking for something in particular. She was looking for something not in the library catalog. She was looking for a journal.

Now, for you and me, a journal is something we might keep under the bed or in a locked box beneath a cement staircase. This is because we do not want it to be read by other people. The journal Violet was looking for was similar. The journals in libraries are usually those belonging to people who are dead. Violet was looking for a journal belonging to someone whose vital status she didn't know for certain, but who she had good reason to believe was alive.

She was looking for Count Olaf's journal.

What could she glean between clippings of terrible theatrical reviews only Violet knows, but she was sure that it would help provide answers. For too much of the lives of these three orphans, they had been pursued and persecuted without knowing why. Violet often thought that, if she could go back to the beginning, if she knew how to get rid of her family fortune, then she would have happily thrown it at Count Olaf's tattooed feet in exchange for the freedom and peace of her siblings. She often wondered if that would have fixed anything. It wasn't like the money was doing them any good now. It couldn't do them any good until they got older, and it seemed an awful lot of people wanted to prevent them ever getting older.

In this world we live in, we often have to pay for things in ways we do not like. Money is often the easiest way to pay for things. But money was not the currency most commonly used in the lives of the Baudelaires. They paid for things in suffering and in labor.

But that was one of the appeals of a library. They didn't have to pay for anything. They could rest here. For one moment, just this one moment, their pursuers were far away. To ears more accustomed to mocking laughter, to having death following them, the susurration of a library was the music of the spheres, a phrase here used to mean 'the sound we imagine planets make while they orbit, from a great distance, a large ball of fire and plasma that could mercilessly destroy them at one touch'. To the Baudelaires, they too were planets given a temporary reprieve from suffering the fate of being consumed.

I am sorry to have to tell you that Violet did not find the journal. She searched until the light faded behind the large stained glass windows at the front of the library, until the lamps lit the room with a soft glow and eerie shadows. She searched until she found her brother and her sister. She had not been particularly looking for them, but was pleased to find them nonetheless.

Klaus had had more success. He had found a legal book that explained that all was not lost. He had found a map of the surrounding areas. He had taken detailed notes on both. Sometimes he thought even geography was against them. You might think that, too, when everyone but you knew of a secret labyrinth of hidden tunnels beneath your home, your school, and every other place you go. Klaus kept a journal of his own. In it, he wrote often of feeling angry that their parents had not told them things that they now needed to know so badly. Their parents had tried to protect them, but by protecting them, had put them into danger. Klaus found it hard to resolve his memories of his parents with what he now knew of their lives. And when he was feeling at his worst and wanted to feel even lower, he would remind himself that Sunny would not remember their parents at all. She would only know them as people who had loved them but had not prepared them. She would know them as people, only, who had died. And for all of Klaus and Violet's reminisces and fondly-told stories, there was a hole in their narrative filled with everything they had not known about their parents.

I deal with such holes in narratives constantly as I search and study the lives of the Baudelaire orphans. I cannot tell you where they went that night when they left the library. I cannot tell you what Sunny made for dinner. I cannot tell you where they got the forest green shawls they were wearing when our story will pick up again.

I can tell you that the Baudelaire orphans were on the run again as soon as the following week, that Klaus threw a book at a plumber, that Violet put her hair up three times, that Sunny started teething again. I can tell you that they returned to that library multiple times. I can tell you that Violet never found that journal.

I will leave you with one final image, one that I found on my own visit to the Inexplicable Library at Sunset Point. Near the eastern-most window, behind the sill, you can still find six initials chiseled in as if by a twelve-year-old boy who is perhaps merely trying to orient himself in a confusing environment, but perhaps was meant as a message to the future. VB KB SB. They were here and now they aren't. Others are here and see what they left. And all left behind in a library.

**Author's Note:**

> [Yuletide Reveal Post](https://lannamichaels.dreamwidth.org/1091887.html)


End file.
